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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger…
I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old and has rotten for modern systems, you can still compile it if you recreate the environment. All you need is :
Why is DeepSeek-V3 supposedly fast and cheap to serve at scale, but too slow and expensive to run locally? Why are some AI models slow to respond but fast once…
A few months ago, I found myself wondering how a command like ping 1.1.1.1 works from within a private network. In most private networks, multiple hosts connect to the Internet through a router. For IPv4, the router performs network address translation (NAT) by rewriting the original host’s source address to the…
The lectures assume no prior knowledge of the Paxos consensus algorithm or of TLA+, the language in which the specifications are written. In fact, the lectures constitute a crash course on TLA+. If you're interested just in the algorithm, you will probably find the specs annoying and will try to read only the…
This is #1 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Welcome.Previous post (#0): Stack Overflow: A Technical DeconstructionNext post...
In software development there are many concepts that at first glance seem useful and sound, but, after considering the consequences of their implementation and use, are actually horrifying. Examples include thread cancellation , variable length arrays , and memory aliasing . GCC’s closure extension to C is another…
Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on…
Andy attempts to revive his blog by predicting what databases will look like in the year 2065.
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience.
In C, 'main' returns an int. What happens when you don't explicitly return a value, though? C99 provides a return value of 0, but C89... well, that's undefined, my favorite kind of behavior.
Linux TCP Tracepoints, and using them via bcc/eBPF.
Update (2016-10-07): The official FAQ has an entry for this exact problem now. I'll leave this post as more curiously minded people.
We try to get rid of the complexity, control it, and seek simplicity. I think framing things that way is misguided. Complexity has to live somewhere. Embrace it
This year was the first time I've attended the Google I/O conference, and it was a fascinating experience. As someone who is primarily an iOS developer and h...
Today we’ll look at one of the most basic and the most often used methods from the Java library: System.currentTimeMillis() .
Few weeks ago I solved a great KVM escaping challenge from TWCTF hosted by @TokyoWesterns . I have given a writeup on my blog: [Write-up] T...
Sep 0.10.0 was released April 22nd, 2025 with optimizations for AVX-512 capable CPUs like the AMD 9950X (Zen 5) and updated benchmarks including the 9950X. Sep now achieves a staggering 21 GB/s on the 9950X for the low-level CSV parsing. 🚀 Before 0.10.0, Sep achieved ~18 GB/s on 9950X.
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
Erik Bernhardsson
